You might get the feeling that you live in a small town when your aunt calls you up and asks if you don’t have a better picture of yourself you could put at the top of your weekly column in the local newspaper where you work as an editor.
“A woman I know asked me the other day if that’s what you really look like,” my aunt said to me, “and I told her, ‘No way, he looks a lot better than that.”’
That said, how it is you really know you live in a small town is when you take your relative’s word for it and get a new picture taken so she won’t have to apologize to the neighbours about her homely nephew anymore.
So, you can thank my aunt for the new mug shot of me at the top of my column in the newspaper today.
(Some of my cousins who read this will wonder which of our many aunts tuned me in 37 years ago about my headshot in The Beacon Herald, the daily newspaper published in my hometown city of Stratford, Ontario, Canada. I won’t be able to be of much help to them because I honestly cannot remember which one it was. Whichever aunt called me, she did me a favour. My new photo was much better than the first one – the darkroom boys did wonders and even added a touch-up or two by means of which I was suddenly endowed with a full head of hair – and maybe even helped me attract the woman I married two years later.)
©1987 Jim Hagarty
